Skype was always a bloated mess. My gaming/friend group started off with it, but between the hard cutoff at 8? 16? people in a call, Skype taking up approximately half of our typically 4 GB of RAM, and people discovering you could crash people's clients by sending them several GB of ;) emoticons which, when rendered into smiley images, would overwhelm most anybody's computer, we ended up switching to Mumble, where we discovered something else Skype had sucked at: audio quality. Mumble took less bandwidth and less system resources, while sounding like someone actually sitting in the room with you (at least to our phone-and-skype adjusted ears).
I beg to differ and strongly disagree. Pre-Microsoft Skype was a genius invention and performed admirably for the time (~2005) considering how limited PC specs and bandwidth were back then.
It used p-2-p over port 80 so it would always reach its destination no matter the firewall rules on your network, and it allowed file transfers up to 2GB(!) in size, in 2005(!).
hmm. My experience with it was ~2010-ish? Mumble came out in 2005, too. Can't say for certain when we switch to Mumble, but it looks like they've had some codex changes over time.
